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Edna St. Vincent MillayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Millay’s poem opens with a frank, straightforward tone, telling the reader that the subject of the poem will be the mother’s courage, and establishing the mother’s absence: “The courage that my mother had / Went with her, and is with her still” (Lines 1-2). The reader immediately understands the stakes of the poem: The speaker’s mother has died, and in her grief, the speaker is ruminating on the mother’s particular quality of courage. In these first two lines, Millay alludes to the speaker’s anxiety, which will surface again later in the poem: The phrase “with her still” (Line 2) implies that the speaker misses and no longer has access to the courage that was a part of her mother’s life. The mother has taken the courage away to the “granite hill” (Line 4).
The first stanza establishes the metric form of the poem, setting the lines in rhyming iambic tetrameter. Each line consists of four metric feet (hence “tetra” or “four”). Each foot is an iamb, a sequence of two syllables, one unstressed, followed by one stressed. This pattern creates a rhythmic tension that propels the reader through the poem with its speech-like pattern.
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
An Ancient Gesture
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ebb
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Will Put Chaos Into Fourteen Lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Lament
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not In A Silver Casket Cool With Pearls
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Song of a Second April
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Spring
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Spring And The Fall
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Travel
Edna St. Vincent Millay